Dr. Sardjito Central General Hospital in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, is a teaching hospital which is affiliated with the Medical School of Gadjah Mada University. Hospital Insider speaks to Managing Director Dr. dr. Darwito on his plans for digitisation, and the need for collaboration in the era of globalisation.
How have you been leading digitisation in your hospital?

We are providing online registration, and we also have some of the features like ER ordering. We already had e-medical records, so we’ve started to make electronic backups. But this is still on-going because we need processes to connect one ward to another, one specialist unit to another, and one nurse to another.

This digitalisation process has been going on for a year. In this one year, almost all types of services have been digitised, but we’re still improving on our progress. We are now developing digitalisation for foster hospitals under RSUP dr. Sardjito.

The system is not only developed interdepartmentally within the hospitals but between hospitals. Because RSUP dr. Sardjito aims to lead in digitalisation of hospital services, starting from outpatient until discharge, including the e-medical records. In the future, the foster hospitals will refer to RSUP dr. Sardjito for the digital healthcare systems.

All of the software used was developed by RSUP dr. Sardjito. We will then conduct marketing campaigns for the other hospitals interested in having the system. Our priority is our foster hospitals.

How has digitalisation increased the quality of healthcare services in your hospital?

Now we can provide healthcare services for 3,000 patients per day.

We can see from our outpatient data. Before digitalisation, we have around 1,500 patients per day, but now we can provide healthcare services for 3,000 patients per day because the community now has better access to them.

Patients need to have assurance that healthcare services will be provided in a punctual way. They need to know when they should come to the hospital, when they will undergo assessments or tests, and when they should get the medicine, and so on. With digitalisation, we can guarantee that this happens.

The community can get information from our website about our services, and we also provide customer service face-to-face and by web. In the future they can, for example, submit their complaints online. They will also be able to refer to the website to get certain information, such as the availability of beds in the hospital, and how to ask for referral letters.

One big challenge for healthcare is retaining talent. How are you doing this in your hospital?

We all know that in order to perform, the doctors need to feel comfortable, and we have to understand why they are working. We offer our doctors the freedom to explore their interest in the field, and we give them opportunity to develop and innovate.

What’s more, most of the specialists here have implemented mono-loyalty, meaning they can only work in one hospital. We guarantee their income – we asked them how much do they want. We did this for our doctors, heart surgeons, plastic surgeons, orthopaedic surgeons and so on.

Some of the doctors have started in 2018 and the new doctors who were just recruited have applied for mono-loyalty. This includes ongoing training to help them increase their knowledge.

What are the trends in healthcare that you have your eye on?

We are interested in ICT and how it can improve hospital services. Our ICT is the anchor. Our IT has developed solutions so that patient reports such as lab results, thorax roentgen, x-ray pictures, CT-Scan, and MRI are based on web. Specialists can access them by computer or tablets.

The most important thing to be aware of now is the globalisation era. Industry 4.0 is the term used nowadays. This means we need to collaborate, in all aspects, in all sectors. Only by collaborating, we can move forward. The key is not competition, but collaboration.